NAM DANG

Introduction
My name is Nam Dang (a.k.a Paddy). I am a Vietnamese student at KAIST (formerly known as Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), South Korea. I have been interested in Computer Science since I was in high school, but wasn't able to really kick off my dream until the second year in my university (we had one year with general courses!!!).

There are many things in computer science that I LOVE. In fact, I love to learn about everything in CS but theoretical courses (for instance, Automata). As a senior student, I am highly interested in Software Engineering, Networking, Formal Modeling and Verification, Distributed Systems, and Social Networking. I haven't decided what to follows in my graduate degree yet, but probably I will try to follow one among the above areas.

Currently I am an intern at Neople from June to August 2010. From January to May 2010, I worked as a Research Student at Provable Software Lab as part of the URP Program at our university. My topic is CREST, a concolic automated test generation tool; the focus of the research is to improve the performance of CREST by parallelization in a distributed model. What I love about this research is that it involves both Software Testing and Networking, the two topics I love.

In my free time, I often watch movies, especially sci-fi movies. One of my favorite are The Matrix (yeah, the reason why I study Computer Science) and Artificial Intelligence: A.I. I also love reading books and listening to radio talks like This American Life or The News from Lake of Wobegon. Also, my favorite newspaper is The New York Times!

I used to do blogging. However, I found myself struggling with my time limitation so often that I decided to abandon it. Yeah, it's a waste because sometimes writing blog can help me practice my (poor) English writing skill somewhat. Also, it was a way to put my ponderous thoughts into words, though I'm pretty sure that not many people find my entries interesting. If possible, I hope to resume my writing in the future.


What I think about Computer Science
I must admit that I am not a really good programmer in terms of speed. Often when switching from one language to another, it takes me a great deal of time to adapt to a different programming style. I also love the ability to manipulate bit by bit of C, yet I think C++ is an amazing language because I can take advantage of both Java and C at the same time. However, as I continue to study computer science, languages has become merely tools to me but not the goal of studying computer science anymore. Probably I just can sum up what I want to say with a quote from the renowned computer scientist Dijkstra, "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."